


The Baby

by SweetPollyOliver



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Ableism, Canon Disabled Character, Children of Characters, Consent Issues, F/M, Gen, Reproductive Rights, auditory processing issues, including the right to have children at all, institutionalisation, losing custody of a child, sensory processing issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 09:16:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4661094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetPollyOliver/pseuds/SweetPollyOliver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Institute is not a fit place for a child to grow up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Baby

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: I tried to imply as explicitly as possible given that the narrator is a third party that the baby was conceived consensually (and deliberately), but consent is dubious given that Lauren does not herself say anything on the subject and as a patient in an institution would be vulnerable to sexual abuse.

Following a conversation was never easy and one with overlapping voices was harder still; not that she heard many of any other kind lately. She had to wait for the voices of people around her to stop being meaningless sounds and arrange themselves in her mind retrospectively into words and her success was mixed even then. There were so many blanks and slurred somethings that she’d have to work out from context, which was one thing, but everything moved so fast that by the time she knew what was happening the group might have sailed on through five other tangents.

It was easier to understand if she closed her eyes or had something to look at that wasn’t too stimulating in its own right. She turned towards walls instinctively like a daisy to the sun.

Looking down at the tiny infant in her arms was about as far from facing a wall as possible.

His face was bright and animated with large solemn eyes and a small pointed nose and a shockingly pink mouth that was wrapped around her finger as he gummed eagerly at the second joint on her knuckle. He was hungry. She should look up for Lauren so she could feed him, but she couldn’t drag her eyes away from him. She was all too acutely aware that the seconds she had left to look at him were numbered. He wasn’t fussing too badly yet. She had approximately four point seven minutes before he started getting indignant about the lack of refreshments offered at the Sarina Douglas babysitting service.

The voices of the others drifted in and out of her awareness. Jack and Lauren were talking rapidly at each other. Their voices were lowered, presumably in the hopes the baby may yet take a nap, and difficult to make out from the breathiness of their whispering, but their anger was palpable still.

Jack was angry with Lauren for not being angrier with the doctors and Lauren was angry with Jack, mostly at this point so that she didn’t have to be brokenhearted.

“Hour/our/are…care/air/fare/fair…[sibilant sound]whine? Shine? -less (oh spineless)”

“MY baby. [loud exhalation] do you [two syllables] I would/should do [that? hat? not hat] I (Lauren turned so she was facing the far wall and the sound of her voice bounced back and made it impossible to distinguish)”

Even with the blanks it wasn’t hard to figure out what they were saying. They’d been at it for months, off and on, ever since it became obvious that while Lauren may have managed to resist being “convinced” that an abortion was the best solution to what the doctors had taken to referring to as her situation, she would not be allowed to raise her son from within the Institute.

It had been put to an ethics committee which had agreed unanimously that the Institute was not an appropriate environment for a child to grow up in. Jack had snatched the letter with their decision out of Lauren’s hand when it arrived and said that he could have told them that.

He hadn’t slept and had barely eaten since then and had spent every moment he could researching cases in the legal database to get an appeal together before Lauren’s parents arrived to take custody. He took breaks only to argue with Lauren about what he thought she should be doing or to hold the baby with uncharacteristic quiet while sitting cross legged on the floor and staring down at him and letting him nurse on his finger. They’d all been doing as much of that as they could.

He loved Lauren’s baby in an all consuming, jealous way—pinned on him his hopes for all of them. He was not the father—Lauren refused to tell anybody who the father was and would not consent to a DNA test while she’d been pregnant (maybe they would find out soon though, now that he was born… maybe they already had found out and had relocated whoever it was, patient or staff, somewhere Lauren wouldn’t see him again), but Jack had never been in the running—but still he thought of the baby as belonging to all of them. Their ‘only legacy’ he called him with equal parts fondness and anger and sorrow. 

It was the deeply empathic kind of selfishness that Jack showed in so much of what he did. He felt Lauren’s pain so deeply that he thought he cared more than she did and was angry with her for it. 

It was hard for Sarina to decide if she wished that Jack would _stop_ or if she thought they would all finally fall to pieces if he did and they were forced to admit that there was no amount of manic outrage that was going to stop the inevitable. 

The inevitable would come soon enough anyway, either way.

Lauren hadn’t named the baby. It had been ten days now since he’d been born. They weren’t sure if she was going to name him at all. She didn’t have a lot of time left now. 

Patrick had said to Sarina and Jack, quietly, when Lauren was changing him last that he thought she didn’t want to give him a name her parents might change. That she could cope with him being taken away from her if there wasn’t that final erasure that he was ever hers. 

So he was just the baby to them. As though he were the only baby in the galaxy who had ever lived. He was certainly the only baby that they were ever likely to see again. 

The Institute was not likely to allow a lapse in vigilance like the one that had enabled Lauren to avoid her birth control hypo again.


End file.
